We need a Dumpling Emoji!

Dumpling art by Yiying Lu. Licensed for non-commercial use. Feel free to share and use with attribution: "Emoji Art by Yiying Lu."

Dumplings are one of the most universal cross-cultural foods in the world. Poland has peirogi, Tibet and Nepal have momos, Russian has pelmeni, Japan has gyoza, Italy has ravioli, Georgia has khinkali and China has potstickers. Yet, there is no dumpling emoji.

While there is a pizza emoji, a taco emoji (which Taco Bell likes to take credit for), a hamburger emoji and even a tempura emoji, there is no usable dumpling emoji in the standard set.

There’s a time to change that and that time is now.

How could this be? Those of us behind the Dumpling Emoji Project were surprised to discover there was no dumpling emoji! What the…?!?

When we started looking into how emojis were determined, we were surprised by how the decision process was concentrated in a handful of multinational American technical corporations.

When you see or send an emoji, that emoji has likely been voted upon by the Unicode Consortium and approved to be standardized across platforms.

Without the guidance presented of the Unicode Consortium, an Apple-created emoji would appear as a jumble on any non-Apple device.

So, who votes on what emoji gets onto this universal lexicon? Well, there are currently only 11 full voting members, and they pay $18,000 a year for the privilege. They include Oracle, IBM, Microsoft, Adobe, Apple, Google, Facebook, and Yahoo. In addition to the U.S. multinationals, the only other three full voting members are the Germany software company SAP, the Chinese telecom company Huawei and the government of Oman.*

We will that the the emoji decision making process needs to be opened up.

While we are pushing for Dumpling Emoji equality, we hope that this campaign also sheds light onto the process of determining how digital communicators are given the tools with which to express ourselves. We think that the decisionmaking power should be more democratic and hope that Dumpling Emoji campaign is the start of that process.

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* There are additional lower tiers of membership that allow for full votes and half votes on the technical committees.